One Moore job to seal the legacy

My father, his father and proud eons of bog-Irish fathers before them believed fiercely in the great divide between women's work and the other sort. I don't recall the phrase ''men's work'' figuring too heavily.

Men got to do adventurous, limit-testing stuff. Stalking wild boar, caulking ships, walking on the moon. (For a positivist intellectual, my father was noticeably primal in his choice of metaphor. But I digress.)

The implication was that men designed the world, made it, polished it to a fine sheen, then passed it back to women for the box-ticking and paperwork. In contemporary politics, this translates as an expectation that men do the vision thing while women focus on management and social policy. Nice and mothery.

But Sydney's past two decades belies it. I wish my Guinness-sozzled forebears could see how the lord mayor, Clover Moore, ably assisted by Monica Barone, chief executive, has thrust right through the "there, there" phase of her early tenure to stalk and caulk the city decisively according to her vision.

Au contraire, m'dear. Clover is nobody's puppet, and she is making it happen.

In 20 years, Sydney has enjoyed three lord mayors; Frank Sartor for 12, Lucy Turnbull for one, Clover Moore for seven. Leaving aside the usual stuff about personality and management style (or its absence), and given that a year is too short for anything more than sandbagging, how, in legacy terms, do Sartor and Moore compare?

Sartor made a point of cultivating an image as a just do it kinda guy. His new memoir, The Fog on the Hill, says "I was lord mayor . . . during the successful Sydney Olympics", as though there was even a single venue in his territory.

He claims "dozens" of major projects. There's even the odd well-lunched journo to support the claim. But, when you actually count, the significant ones are few. There's Customs House; the gloomy underground pool at Cook and Phillip Park (hostile square above); the Angel Place Recital Hall; the Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool refurb; Martin Place; horrid little Wynyard Park; community centres in Ultimo and The Rocks; and the granite footpaths on George.

Most of these were conceived in the first of Sartor's three mayoral terms. After that, in true Olympic fashion, his priorities drifted to flowers, parties and other ephemerals; in particular the massive NYE fireworks blowout that, even now, he singles out for self-praise.

"A complex interaction of the two levels of government and various authorities," is how he puts it, but "partay partay parTAY!" might be just as accurate.

Looking back, you'd wonder whether that gentle segue into sound and sparks wasn't a harbinger of Sartor's own imminent slippage into the NSW Labor partay, which gradually perfected this art of sending millions of dollars up in smoke.

Clover has had twice the budget, but spread over four times the area, and little more than half the time. Yet already she has outbuilt Sartor and outdesigned him, too.

Clover's works include several world-class buildings. Harry Seidler's Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre, one of Sydney's finest rooms (notwithstanding change areas forcing you to rub bottoms with your neighbour, giving a new slant to community relations).

FJMT's Surry Hills Library, over which this column has slobbered shamelessly on earlier occasions. TZG's enchanting Paddington Reservoir Gardens, which so impressed the New York City urban designer Jeff Shumaker he couldn't stop telling Phillip Adams about it.

There's also BVN's very fine work at Redfern Park (which Labor wanted to hand to Souths for commercial development); Lacoste+Stevenson's new Rushcutters Bay grandstand and kiosk; Hill Thalis's lovely Pirrama Park in Pyrmont; and the remarkable makeover of Prince Alfred Park at Central, with its earth-sheltered pool by Rachel Neeson and the late, greatly talented Nick Murcutt.

It's all, bit by bit, enriching our urban world. There's also the Burton Street Tabernacle, about to become the new Tabernacle Theatre, and any number of parks throughout Glebe, Pyrmont, Surry Hills, Rosebery, Elizabeth Bay and St Peters.

Add to this the cycleways, which are both brilliant to use and graphically pleasing, and you have quite a legacy. Naturally, each election, her majority increases. Not bad, for a girl.

Ironically, this very success could prove Clover's undoing.

Barry O'Farrell has vowed to legislate so that she and others can't "double dip". The city, though, is a special case. Clover's duties as lord mayor and MP for Sydney make a natural (and traditional) fit. And, although O'Farrell whinges when Clover takes a few days off, she has introduced no fewer than 12 private member's bills - most of them successful - in 23 years.

And all that without party dollars, votes or back-up. However you cut it, Clover is just very good at staying on track and getting stuff done.

So, having done all the easy stuff, what should Clover do next? My view is this. There's one glaring move that would do more to transform Sydney's next century than any other single project. It's huge, it's daring - and any European city with this opportunity would have done it decades back.

It's this. Build over the tracks behind Central. All the way from Redfern Station to about Rutland Street, you could heal the great wound. Not only would this ease the appalling uptown traffic glut, it'd let us expand the park, connect the streets (stroll from Bourke Street Bakery to the White Rabbit in a few pleasant minutes) and still leave a development site twice the size of Broadway's Central Park.

See it as high density, ultra chic, fine grained, high design, zero carbon and autonomous in energy, water and waste. The difficulty, which is considerable, is less technical than political. That demands serious leadership; serious moral bacon. If anyone in this town can bring it home, it's that chick Clover.